


Påske

by GoWithTheFlo20



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cults, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Muggle, Alternate Universe - No Hogwarts, Alternate Universe - No Voldemort, Alternate Universe - Norse Religion & Lore, Animal Sacrifice, Animism, BAMF Harry Potter, BAMF Hermione Granger, Dark Magic, Easter, Eventual Smut, F/M, Female Harry Potter, Fertility Issues, Harry Potter is a Good Friend, Hermione Granger is a Good Friend, Iceland, Inspired by Midsommar (2019), Is It A Cult If Their Beliefs Are Real?, Magic Revealed, Mentions of Myth & Folklore, Pagan Festivals, Pagan Gods, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Religious Cults, Spring, Until it isn't
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:26:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28791684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoWithTheFlo20/pseuds/GoWithTheFlo20
Summary: Hjördis Potter has lived a sheltered life until she was invited to her grandparents rural, and isolated, home in Iceland to participate in Påske celebrations. Taking her dear, and only friend, Hermione Granger along for the ride, a two week vacation full of egg painting, maypole dances and the odd chocolate hunt devolves into something entirely more ominous. No one ever said the Gods were kind.
Relationships: Fenrir Greyback/Harry Potter, Hermione Granger/Thorfinn Rowle, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Lily Evans/Baldr
Comments: 3
Kudos: 62





	1. Big Things, Little Things, and Nothings.

Her parents were fighting again. They did that a lot lately. Over big things, and little things, and things Hjördis had not known were _things_ at all until either Lily or James sniped back in _that_ voice.

The voice that meant trouble. The voice that meant someone was sleeping on the couch tonight. The voice that meant Hjördis's happy little home was not quite happy, nor really a home. 

This morning the spat was triggered by James answering the landline. Nothing too monumental, if it weren’t her grandfather, Ívan, speaking from the other end.

_“Of course I answered the phone, Lily! It’s the bloody phone! I don’t understand your problem here. It's been years since you've spoken to them. Give them a chance to-”_

Hjördis knew very little about her grandparents from her mother’s side, though she had presents waiting underneath the Christmas tree every year with their names on the tags. Lily had become estranged from them long ago, and that had been that. Hjördis knew they came from Iceland and had settled in Cokesworth, England, during the roaring sixties. She knew her grandmother’s name was Þórunn. She knew Lily had started out in life as Liljá Ívansdóttir _-last names in Iceland was a whole other affair-_ and had eventually become evangelised to Lily Evans, just as Hjördis was only Hjördis to her estranged grandparents and birth certificate, but Harriet to her friends and family.

_“You wouldn’t, would you! You don’t know my parents like I do, James. You’ve truly buggered it up this time!”_

And she knew they had gone swanning back to Iceland exactly seventeen years ago, two days after Hjördis’s birth and gifting her name, never to be heard from again.

_“Come off it, Lily. Ivan and Thorunn have been nothing but kind to us. They want to see their granddaughter, and can you blame them? It’s been seventeen years and you’ve-“_

_“For good reason! It’s been seventeen years for a good bloody reason James, and if it were my say, I’d add another seventeen!”_

Only they _had_ been heard from again. This morning, on a phone, asking if Hjördis could come to Öafjörður, a small little village populated by a whopping total of _Ninety-three_ people, to celebrate Påske, whatever the hell that was, during the school holidays coming up.

_“They said she could take a friend! It’s not like we’d be shipping her off to-“_

_“Oh, yeah, let’s send another little lamb to the slaughter, shall we? Brilliant, James. Bloody brilliant.”_

_“Fuckin’ hell lily! Do you hear yourself? You sound paranoid! She would be spending time with her family, getting to know half her roots, not being strung up and tortured! You make it sound like some sort of crazed-“_

Hjördis knew the argument was coming to a sticky end, the sound of something smashing, a vase likely, punctuated words she could not hear from the stairwell.

_“You don’t know what you’ve done! You don’t understand what you’ve invited into our home! You don’t-“_

_“You’re right I don’t understand, Lily. You never speak about your family, or your home, so how am I meant to know?”_

A chilly, long drawn silence.

Hjördis heard her father sigh.

_“It doesn’t matter. I said yes. She’s my daughter too, Lily. She’s **my** daughter too.” _

_“Where are you going? Let me guess, Sirius? Well go then, and don’t come back!”_

The slap of the back door felt like a punch to the gut.

When James stormed out it was never just leaving the house was it? You left the people behind that slammed door too.

Hjördis stood from the stairs after a lingering, wordless moment, slipped down the hall, and came to a stop at the ajar kitchen door.

Lily Evans was crouched on the floor, picking up broken bits of pottery.

That was funny, wasn’t it?

Sad too, if one looked a little too deep for meaning.

“You alright mom?”

Lily glanced up, eyes stung red. She dropped the shards and promptly wiped the back of her hand across her blistered nose, trying her best to smile as she dusted off her hands and came to a stand.

“Never better darling! Had a little accident with the-“

“Mom.”

Hjördis doesn’t say it cruelly. There’s nothing callous or harsh in her voice. Perhaps that was worse, perhaps softness could sometimes hit harder, because Lily crumpled, staggering closer to clasp at her face, lip wobbling.

“Nothing to concern _yourself_ with.”

But it was. It always was. Lily and James’s arguments lately, over big things, and little things, and things Hjördis hadn’t known were things at all, had one common thread.

Hjördis herself.

James wanted to send her to a private school in Scotland.

Her mother wanted her home-schooled.

James wanted her to go out with friends, have sleepovers, sneak whisky and get drunk in parks, like a normal teenager.

Lily wanted her at home, safe in bed, far away from the outside world.

Lily won some, Hjördis was home-schooled since she was three, but James won others, sometimes she stayed over at Hermione Granger’s house, a friend from down the street, not far at all but an ocean away by the way her mother acted. 

Sometimes Hjördis felt like a stretch of rope being pulled by both ends by two rabid dogs.

Two rabid dogs she loved dearly, but dogs with sharp teeth all the same.

“You know, I won’t go. I can stay here and… Visit Hermione. Catch up on some reading. Play some sports in the back garden with Uncle Remus and Uncle Sirius.”

Lily patted her cheek tenderly, wrapping a sunny-blonde curl back behind a small ear.

Strange that, too, Hjördis thought. 

Her mother was a redhead, through and through, with the temper to match. 

Her father had a shock of black messy curls. 

“Too late for that I’m afraid. Your father’s gone and said yes.”

It wasn’t too late at all, Hjördis thought. They could ring up granddad and tell him Hjördis was busy with a school project, she had come down with the flu, she was already scheduled to go on another trip somewhere that had slipped James’s mind. A million excuses to use.

And yet… Yet Lily was seemingly as stubborn on this as she always was with everything, as if she were saying the sun would rise tomorrow, and the world would turn again, and your father had given his word and so it will stay unbroken.

“Well… I won’t be gone long. Two weeks, that’s it. That’s how long Easter holiday is.”

Lily’s hand fell from her face.

“Two weeks… and you’ll be back. Promise me you’ll come back, Hjördis.”

The use of her given name, and not Harriet or Harry, stalled her for a moment, just long enough for her mother to push.

“Promise me, Hjördis.”

She blinked and tried to smile, tried to shirk off the suddenly unsettling notion that there was a chance, _any_ chance, that she wouldn’t come home.

“I promise. Why wouldn’t I come back?”

Lily nodded and spun, turned away, back to the broken vase sprayed across the floor. Hjördis couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see her eyes, eyes she had taken from her mother and nothing much else, and the abrupt draft of cold bit down deep.

“Why indeed.”

Lily coughed, crouched, and began anew plucking up the broken pieces.

The sight made Hjördis cringe.

“Ask Hermione if she would like to go with you. Your father’s right about one thing… Two of you are better than one. You can… You can look out for each other over there. Bring each other home.”

And that was that.

Hjördis went to leave, went to go phone Hermione, tell her the news, ask for her company to visit grandparents she had only ever seen minutes old, in a country so far away, when her mother’s voice pulled her back to the kitchen.

“I love you… More than you can know. Everything I’ve done is because I love you.”

Hjördis laughed, and it sounded more like she was being strangled.

Felt like it too. 

“Love you too mom.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Öafjörður is not a real village, but I did base it off a real place in Iceland called Bakkafjörður which does only have eighty inhabitants. I changed the population a little, because it comes into play later, as nine and three are both significant numbers in Norse mythology. 
> 
> This fic is also inspired by a few films. Midsommar 2019, The Ritual 2017, and Equinox (Netflix) 2020.


	2. Between Bird and Beast

The airplane ride was not as intimidating as Hjördis first believed it would be. There was a moment, as wheels left tarmac, where there came a sound as if thunder had been stretched, and for an instant, the briefest of seconds, her hands had tightened around the armrests, but then…

Well, then she looked outside the oval window, saw a land shrinking below her feet, a sky growing above her head with wisps of white, and suddenly she was _flying._

There was something magical in that.

From her seat beside the window she spent most of her first ride staring out. The wing was floodlit, dipping into clouds, shining and then shaded, shaded and then shining, darting between a place of earth and air and light and dark, and as Hjördis watched, she listened to the gentle hum.

It sounded like a lullaby.

By the time the flight was over, and a city was scarcely detectable beneath, Hjördis was titling her head downwards, seeking lights that flashed, the red, white and blue in the darkest of skies, and a metropolis swelled to life.

The plane landed on the strip of brightly lit tarmac, wheels bouncing a kiss, and then she was there.

In Iceland.

A whole other country.

A whole other place.

Hjördis Potter had never left Godric’s Hollow before, and for a girl who had only ever travelled between six streets, Keflavik could have been an entirely other realm of existence.

Maybe it was.

Maybe somewhere over the Nordic seas Hjördis had slipped into another facet of life, another dimension, someplace where people could fly, and cities could swell, and Hjördis could feel so very, very _free_.

A place where Hermione Granger was waiting for her at the terminal, having caught an earlier flight from Greece where she had been visiting her own grandparents, and had no time for Hjördis melodramatics.

_Shit._

The hectic journey off the plane was not quite so fantastical as the flight had been, being squished and pushed and pulled along by a throng of tired tourists, but god…

Hjördis loved every moment of it.

Hermione and Hjördis met outside the airport and hired a small little car to carry them from Keflavik to Öafjörður. At seventeen, both barely passed the legal age in Iceland to drive, but with a bit of added insurance and lighter purses and wallets, the deal was struck and away they went.

And went.

And went.

And went.

There was no direct flight to Öafjörður, the village was too remote, and so they had to land near Reykjavik, the capital, and drive the eight-and-a-half-hour journey themselves.

Hjördis’s grandfather had said he would pick them up originally, but an hour before their flights had left Gatwick and Athens his own tires had blown out on a mountain pass, and for an isolated village on the fringes of _fringes_ the repair man couldn’t bring new ones for two days.

Hjördis didn’t mind too much. She and Hermione were going to take turns behind the wheel in two hour shifts, and It gave Hjördis longer to think, longer to rest, longer to… not think about meeting grandparents she had never met before. 

Or, at the very least, could not _remember_ meeting.

It gave Hermione longer too, to spew everything she had read in the Icelandic travel guide she had bought three days ago.

“Did you know you can still see the Northern lights even now? They last till the end of April. We’ll have to schedule a night to sit out and see them. I forgot to bring my camera but I’m sure I could buy one near-“

“You don’t need a camera to see the Northern lights, Hermione. You just… _see_ them.”

The girl in question huffed behind the wheel, the shoulder splay of her weatherproof jacket crinkling like the bridge of her nose.

“Yes, yes, live in the moment and all that jazz you’re so fond of, but I _do_ need a camera. How else will I compile proper notes on any artefacts we see? Or customs? Or architecture? My notes will only take me so far in recording-“

Hjördis laughed, a bell that bounced from window to car seat and back again.

“Ever the anthropologist. I’m wounded, Hermione. Truly. Did you agree to come for me or for the prospect of finishing your sociology A level?”

On the long and winding road, Hermione dared a glance her way, whiskey eyes weak.

“Of course I came for you, Harry.”

There was a gentleness there that Hjördis didn’t want to look too closely at. A precipitous pity of a girl going into the unknown, a _nervous_ girl going into the unfamiliar.

Hjördis wasn’t scared of meeting her bloody grandparents.

She _wasn’t._

Hermione, ever intuitive, must have picked up on her sudden sullen shift, and changed gears.

“But… A sociological study on a remote Icelandic people might look awfully pretty on my Oxford application.”

Anew Hjördis laughed, as easy as sunshine, as soft as starlight.

Hermione always knew exactly what to say, quite unlike Hjördis who generally said the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong people.

“You’re terrible.”

Hermione grinned.

“Only a little.”

Hjördis peered out the window, brushing her curly glaringly-gilt hair out her face. Once More, she was hit with how strange all this was by the sight of the open frost-bitten steppes around her. Sitting here, now, in a metal box, on an empty winding road, on a knoll between towns, at the west of a cold, cold country, so far from everything and everyone else.

A man could make a home out here, between beast and bird.

Hjördis could make a home out here, she thought peculiarly.

There would be no walls to hide behind, and no staircases to sit on and hear arguing.

No mere six streets to walk.

The sky and the waters were her limits and-

And it, this feeling, this unexpected sensation of… of…

Of _coming_ home was completely, utterly ridiculous. Nothing but Jetlag talking. That’s all. Homesickness would strike soon. Perhaps in a day or two. Things would make sense when she had some proper food in her.

What was it her father always said?

Her insatiable need for adventure was her Viking blood talking and the Potter in her answering.

And her mother?

The best way to quiet down that Viking is by a belly full of meat and mead, and the Potter half could have a good bonk on the head to give some common sense.

“How’s you’re A levels going? Still thinking of taking that biochemistry degree over in Oxford with me? Don’t tell me you’re a Cambridge girl now?”

_No._

No, Hjördis wasn’t, she was, in fact, spending most her nights looking up police entry exams and admission routes. It was a pipe dream, certainly. Lily would want her to have nothing to do with _anything_ that required her to wear a bullet proof vest on occasion, and as a policeman himself, a Sergeant to boot, James, for once, would agree with her mother.

They would likely wrangle in Remus and Sirius to lock her up till she was sixty.

“I’ve been looking at programs.”

It was the best Hjördis could do, could say, without lying, and that, lying to Hermione, was something she never wanted to do.

Lying in general had never come easy, or at all, to Hjördis. 

“Programs? But you’re extraordinary at chemistry, Harry! Remember that private tutor you had? Professor Snape? He said you were the best student he had ever taught. Oxford would have agreed to take you last year if you had applied by the deadline for advanced admission like you said you would but then missed.”

Hjördis scoffed hoping it hid the wince.

She had planned on applying, genuinely, but then she and Hermione would be in different years, and there was no distant learning from Oxford like her mother wanted for Hjördis, and-

And it had all just collapsed in on itself.

Much like everything in Hjördis's life. 

“And he also said everyone he teaches are dunderheads. It wasn’t much of a compliment, trust me. Snape loathed me. The prick.”

Even here, at seventeen, Hermione acted scandalized, blinking over at her.

“You can’t call a teacher that!”

Hjördis grinned toothily.

“I just bloody well did. Admit it, he _was_ a prick. He made you cry once, remember? Always scowling. Always with his nose in the air. Great big greasy fuck-“

It happened so fast.

A glance out the front windshield.

A twist in her gut.

A yell.

“STOP!”

Hermione slammed on the breaks, and the car tires screeched across asphalt, the wheel locked, belts jerked tight, hearts leapt into throats.

Hjördis’s hands snapped out to brace herself against the console, breath lodging in her throat as the car shuddered to a halt.

“What the he-“

Hermione saw what she had.

A stag laid splayed across the road, right between two white stripes, gaze a terrible milky white.

A head slunk up from torn belly of the Stag, maw raw red with blood and fur and meat.

The wolf, a colossus of a animal, speckled grey and white and that vibrant red striped down its thick throat like warpaint, stalked up, yellow eye keen and cold and brilliant.

And it stared.

Gazed right at Hjördis.

Eye to eye.

There was something _smart_ in those eyes, Hjördis thought.

Something smart and dangerous.

There was a sharp knock to Hjördis's side, an elbow pressing uncomfortably under a stock-still rib, a hissing, panicked voice drifting to her ear. 

"Lower your gaze! It's a wolf, a canine! They take eye contact as a challenge!"

But Hjördis kept looking. _Can't stop looking._ Keen and dangerous to something lost but brave. 

And then it was gone, lopping off to the side, into the frosty grass, down and away through the hill.

Hjördis couldn’t move for a long while, numb fingers pressed against console.

“You alright, Hermione?”

Hermione didn’t seem to be faring much better, staring blankly over the wheel, foot still pressing pedal to car bed.

“Yeah… Yeah, I’m okay. Are you?”

Hjördis didn’t answer. Instead, she reached for her buckle, freed herself from the strap and stretched for the car door handle.

“Where are you going, it could still be out there and-“

“It’s gone. It ran, but this road is narrow and if we want to get to Öafjörður by nightfall, I need to get that stag out the way.”

Hermione swallowed deep.

“I’ll… I’ll uh, help. Keep an eye out while you drag it to the side. What was it doing here? Wolves aren't native to Iceland, and I'm pretty sure deer aren't either. Do you think there's a breeder around? They're trying to reintegrate wolves back into the wild up in Scotland and...”

Hermione’s fingers fumbled with her own buckle, and her tirade faded into white noise as the two teens tumbled out, one watching the grass closely as she balanced the pros and cons of species reintroduction, the other heaving a stag she shouldn’t have been able to move by herself all too easily.

Hjördis didn’t look down, not really. Couldn’t stomach the thought of looking at the creature commonly found on her families emblem, the inspiration for her father’s nickname Prongs, split from sternum to groin in jagged slivers.

It definitely wasn't a reindeer. 

A stag. 

A bloody stag in her hands. 

What a start to a journey. 

Hjördis used a spare bottle of water to wash her hands off before she got back into the car, and tried valiantly to ignore the slither of rust left beneath her nails now.

Neither girl spoke much after that.

Neither did they notice the bizarre, and new, set of scratches interlocked on the back bumper of their rental car, stamped in a dented, scraped circle. Two sideways mountain huddled together if one squinted, or, perhaps, a serrated B.


End file.
